Heart of Man Part 3

The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be shown in the pure type of some one pa.s.sion as in Romeo, or in the various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative; and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act.

Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our own individuality a.s.serts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the life. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our hearts with love and anger, with compa.s.sion and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in their n.o.ble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is the service which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us a scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into men's bosoms.

Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and important plot, and in a compa.s.s far greater than is normal in ordinary life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And, secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--the pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in pa.s.sing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathy and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick.

It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the elementary pa.s.sions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules, as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.

Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional energy acc.u.mulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and terror, if they do acc.u.mulate in their particular forms latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, which similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain painless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance, and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in all tragic art.

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as has been a.s.sumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life; it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often and diversely a.n.a.lyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the difference between its created concrete and the original out of which that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind.

It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice.

It will be said at once that all these concrete representations necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the quant.i.ties of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.

Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, cla.s.sical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, const.i.tutes decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.

Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are clearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.

How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture, pa.s.sing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age.

Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain cla.s.sic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; cla.s.sicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.

The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the common nature of man results. Is it to know others as different from ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a nation's effort. Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and h.o.m.ogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As these historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus; and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices, superst.i.tions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at the centre of its expression, a s.h.i.+ning nucleus amid its planetary stars; such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance.

The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question which to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art has been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal, the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the vanis.h.i.+ng-point of realism into the moment of sense.

The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide range is in each creation pa.s.sed through the mind of the artist and presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the originality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. In rendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically admitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take the account of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, though they thereby only subst.i.tute their own error for that of the artist.

This personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus of human nature.

The differences in personality go far deeper than this common liability of humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. The isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his private experience, and results from his original faculties and the special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have been determined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; a man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life, characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others, because he must draw on that store for his materials. Thus a man's character, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting in conjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presents the universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in his apprehension of it and its meaning.

Genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the man differs from the average in ways that find significant expression. This difference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normal human nature, due to circ.u.mstances or to inherent defect or to a thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological and may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development of normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things, in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombination and expression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the human spirit are made. The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound, and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius const.i.tutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set forth and ill.u.s.trated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a whole.

The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has different degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that it enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of being felt universally,--the profound moods of the meditative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one of action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively rendered, from its being ill.u.s.trative of life in general; so, too, if the felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treated as typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet is variously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance, has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a high normal type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, in fact, only a detail of the general proposition that in art history has no value of its own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his nature and career, like that of any character or event in history, have no artistic value beyond their universal significance. In such self-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depraved nature, such as Villon; but such a type takes its place with other criminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in another sphere.

This element of self finds its intense expression in lyrical love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of the emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellous victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward mood, emotion, or pa.s.sion of the singer. Nature is emptied of her contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet's method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent with his own spirit.

Sh.e.l.ley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical power. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object of his invocation,--

"Be thou me, impetuous one!"

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolution of this one moment of pa.s.sion is lyric form, whose unity lies in personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external world which is its imagery,--its body lifted from the dust, woven of light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here, too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty, but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of, though this is rare in merely lyrical expression.

The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thus built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an entire series of ill.u.s.trative instances but without multiplicity,--if it be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,--that would be to know it as it exists to the mind of G.o.d; that would be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of G.o.d," as Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,--operative upon the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before it pa.s.sed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man idealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in n.o.ble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on?

In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra.

Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads, remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them?

Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race; these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that pa.s.sion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and a.s.sumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?

Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no falsehood in such antic.i.p.ation; there is only a faith in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual America? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a future whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in this ideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in his great oration, and Virgil in his n.o.ble poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his motley the art of literature.

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social, and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be n.o.bler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art presents it.

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be; an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.

We may think of G.o.d as conserving all, or as permitting h.e.l.l, which is death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of d.a.m.nation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our mortality with its pa.s.sion and ignorance, which are our most undermining and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.

Ideal literature in its broad compa.s.s, between its opposed poles of good and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that are, in selected and typical examples.

It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower and baser forms of life in the ma.s.ses under civilization, which has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here realism ill.u.s.trates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling, the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social process,--which is a challenge to the power of G.o.d, and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order.

Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of past time,--eras of savagery, a.s.syrian civilizations, Christian butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us; yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must G.o.d be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual bliss as Christians fas.h.i.+on saint, angel, and archangel? These are rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our desires and the warfare of our will, we a.s.sert in art our faith that the divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from G.o.d,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature a.s.serts this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the will to live.

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe as we believe G.o.d sees it, he would behold it as an artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving like G.o.d's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of limiting the field to the compa.s.s of human faculties that we may see within our capacities as G.o.d sees, and hence have such faith? Is art after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the h.e.l.l of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of G.o.d exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of wors.h.i.+p; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without G.o.d in the world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare we a.s.sert that fatalistic optimism which would have it that the universe is in G.o.d's eyes a perfect world? I can find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the world.

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the never-attained; but they still make on in their ma.s.s to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual uplifting to G.o.d of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a thing that pa.s.ses away. It is also true that the world of knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more, and in growing sheds its outworn sh.e.l.ls, its past body. Let us consider the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the G.o.ds; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already ill.u.s.trated in lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and shows a purely spiritual body.

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It is ill.u.s.trated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, which enn.o.bles it beyond the power of personal prowess and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.

Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of G.o.d, out of whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"

Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance.

The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and h.e.l.l, have their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.

It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language; and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.

The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a pa.s.sing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the pa.s.sing away of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to another, as in the case of the subst.i.tution of the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor that in the ma.s.s of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.

There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.

Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer, something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living; they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so, not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they contain,--in man,

"Equal, uncla.s.sed, tribeless, and nationless";

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,-- racial and secular states and doc.u.ments of a spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages in the human ma.s.s, still barbarous, still pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a forward reach.

The nature of the changes which time brings may best be ill.u.s.trated from the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance, the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower, overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and yet preserving their dual reality.

The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought, even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.

In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is the most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior beings of heaven and h.e.l.l in direct antagonism; but here, too, the machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however strongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. The truth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in society, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement of G.o.d's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived